Disputes over Water Will Be an Increasing Source of International Tension

Feb 28, 2019 | Economist
View Original

It has become a cliché of doom-mongering: future wars will be over water. The forecast is old enough to face a sceptical backlash. Whatever happened, people ask, to the water wars? One answer emphasises the role water has played in past conflicts. In his autobiography, Ariel Sharon, who before becoming Israel’s prime minister had been a commander in the six-day war of 1967, wrote that it “really started on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan…The matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death.”